[Summary][Slide]

Making Computers Accessible to Everyone Project Leader and Chief Engineer The Archimedes Project, Stanford University.

In this talk, Neil Scott will describe some of the lessons he has learned from almost twenty-five years of designing interfaces for disabled people and show how they could lead to better tools for all of us. For example, combining several different modes of interaction can simplify many of the tasks we perform on a computer. The simplest example of this is entering text with a keyboard and pointing to an object on the screen with the mouse. People who can't use their hands -- or prefer not to -- often use speech recognition as an alternative way to perform these functions. While speech recognition does a fair job of entering text, it is a very clumsy way to control a mouse. Head tracking, on the other hand, performs mouse functions extremely well but is a clumsy alternative to the keyboard for entering text. Combining these strategies, however, produces a solution that is superior to using either alone. Performance can be improved even further by adding other modalities such as special switches for clicking the mouse buttons or eye tracking for selecting options from menus. Adding multimodal interfaces to a conventional computer, without disturbing normal operations, is a far from trivial exercise that may involve wrestling with hardware and software compatibility issues, searching for suitable software drivers, and compensating for degraded system performance. I will describe a universal user interface called the Total Access System (TAS) developed by the Archimedes Project to eliminate these problems. Using TAS makes it extremely quick and easy to add and support multimodal operation on any computer without degrading the performance of the target system in any way.

ngscott@csli.Stanford.edu

Neil G. Scott Ngscott@arch.stanford.edu

Neil Scott is Leader and Chief Engineer for the Archimedes Project at Stanford University. For his invention of the Total Access System, described in this talk, Scott was nominated in the 1997 Discover Magazine awards as one of the five top innovators in the United States in the field of computer hardware and electronics. The lead article in the January 2000 edition of San Francisco magazine featured him as one of fifteen Bay Area futurists who will shape the way people live, think, work and play in the new millennium.